Rojas' RCRD LBL: Free, Legal Music We Like

As promised, RCRD LBL, the new music jv between Peter Rojas and Downtown Records, is up today. And as we had heard, it is indeed pretty cool. It's essentially a music-promotion site with some blog/social networking elements. The neat twist: Free, ad-supported music downloads.

We've seen several ad-supported music models so far, and our reactions have ranged from lukewarm (iMeem) to ice-cold (SpiralFrog, QTrax). The main problem with prior efforts is that they don't let consumers listen to music the way they want to: Download a song to your hard drive, then listen to it using Apple's (AAPL) iTunes or iPods. But since RCRD LBL's tracks are DRM-free MP3s, you can do whatever you'd like with the music. The ads, meanwhile, are on the site, not the tracks themselves...
The business model is more sustainable than QTrax and SpiralFrog, as well: Rather than pay the major labels and publishers onerous licensing advances and royalties, the WSJ reports, Rojas and co. will pay modest per-song advances of $500 to $5,000 but won't be sharing any advertising revenues with the acts. In fairness to the other services, note that RCRD LBL is a boutique site promoting boutique music - much of it from JV partner Downtown Music - and it's not meant to provide fans with complete access to any music they want. But it's certainly worth checking out.

Update: Can't get enough Peter Rojas? The good people at Nikon, one of RCRD LBL sponsors, have sent us a link to this podcast, featuring a Nikon PR guy interviewing Peter; no idea if it's worth listening to or not, but have at it.

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